Please note that this post contains two links to articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We regret the necessity of linking to an outlet whose writers and other employees are on strike, but the Wayback Machine is not working for the PG’s web site at time of writing and the links are essential to provide context for our piece.

It’s finally official. Last Tuesday the Pittsburgh City Council confirmed Larry Scirotto as the new chief of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. While, as we’ve said before, it doesn’t make a lot of difference who is running the PBP, the process surrounding Scirotto’s selection is revealing.

For starters, we finally know what’s been going through former acting chief Thomas Stangrecki’s mind for the last five months. Back in January Stangrecki instructed his officers to ignore a city ordinance prohibiting them from using minor vehicle violations like tinted windows as pretexts for traffic stops, on the flimsy excuse that the ordinance was in violation of state law. This was an odd move from a man hoping to ascend to the permanent chief’s job. Why would he risk pissing off Mayor Gainey with such a blatantly defiant policy shift? Had Strangecki been tipped off that he was out the running for the permanent spot and was lashing out in frustration? Or had he been informed that the job was his, that the search was a sham, and he was starting to reshape the PBP to his liking? We now know it was likely the former.

The choice of Scirotto is interesting for other reasons as well. Last month, the names of the three finalists for the chief’s position were leaked to the Post-Gazette, Scirotto’s among them. The other two were former Pittsburgh police commander Jason Lando, and former Boise, Idaho police chief Ryan Lee. It’s a fascinating group. Two of them, Scirotto and Lando, were former high-ranking Pittsburgh cops who had moved on to run police departments in other cities (Lando in Frederick, Maryland and Scirotto in Fort Lauderdale). Lee, in sharp contrast, was an outsider who had been fired in Boise for seriously injuring a fellow cop’s neck during an impromptu chokehold demonstration. Were there really only two other candidates in the whole country as qualified as him?

Thanks to the extraordinary secrecy under which the search was conducted, we may never know for sure. It’s possible that Lee never had a chance and was only included on the list to temporarily mollify conservatives on the City Council and police force. It is unclear how many of those conservatives would have known anything about who was under consideration, but a team from the police union was involved in the selection process. It was supposedly bound by nondisclosure agreements, but Strangecki’s January tantrum would seem to indicate that these might not have been scrupulously adhered to.

It’s also possible that Lee was just the third-best of a bad lot, that no serious candidate without ties to Pittsburgh who had any other options wanted the job. The one thing all three finalists had in common was previous experience as a police chief, meaning that such experience was probably a requirement. Lee may only have been a finalist because only three current or former chiefs even bothered applying. It wouldn’t be too surprising if many top cops didn’t want to risk working for a progressive Black mayor in a city with a history of high turnover at the chief’s position.

Either way, we can assume Lee was never under serious consideration. Gainey still had the rare luxury of choosing between two candidates with the dual advantages of experience running a police department outside the city, and long years serving in Pittsburgh’s own force. He went with the one who was gay, biracial, and got fired from his last position for being too committed to diversity in hiring. Scirotto is insulated from criticism from liberals because on paper he’s exactly what they want. The Fraternal Order of Police can’t complain too much either, at least initially, because they never expressed any problem with Scirotto during his 23-year previous tenure with the PBP.

What the new chief does with his honeymoon remains to be seen, but we’re starting to get some clues. In an extensive interview last week with the Post-Gazette, Scirotto complained bitterly about the amount of time his officers waste responding to parking complaints and false burglar alarms, along with taking theft reports. He was sending two messages in the interview, one explicit, the other more obscure but still obvious to the intended recipients.

The obscure one was granting an interview to the PG at all. Gainey’s administration has been boycotting the newspaper since the PG’s employees went on strike and were replaced by scabs. Scirotto could just as easily have given his interview to the Pittsburgh Union Progress, a web publication run by the striking PG journalists – or at least to Trib Live. His choice of news outlets is a coded missive to the FOP that he doesn’t share Gainey’s politics and is willing to stand up to the mayor, and one delivered so subtly that Gainey can’t complain without looking like an overbearing nitpicker.

Scirotto’s explicit message was even more eye-opening, at least to anyone  not intimately familiar with local police procedures. Pittsburgh police spend 45,000 cop-hours responding to 10,000 complaints about parking every year. An additional 70,000 cop-hours go to dealing with the 7,000 annual burglar alarm alerts, 99% of which are false. (The burglar alarms take more time per incident because they require two cars in response.) Many Pittsburghers, your humble correspondents included, had no idea that calling 911 over a shitty parking job was even a thing. But as hilarious as it is that the kind of Karens who call the cops over an expired meter are actually crippling the operations of the police they love so much, we have to be wary. If Scirotto gets what he wants, the parking issues will be dealt with by a different agency (presumably the Pittsburgh Parking Authority), and the theft reports will be taken on line. While Scirotto didn’t say how many cop-hours are currently being consumed by theft reports, a rough estimate indicates that both these measures would free up about 30 officers worth of time a year (assuming 2,000 annual working hours per cop), nearly equivalent to a full police academy class.

Initially these newfound hours might go mostly toward reducing the PBP’s overtime bill, but as recruiting efforts ramp up, more and more cops would be available to pull over Black drivers for having frames on their license plates and other such racist and discriminatory practices. It’s worth noting that Scirotto has not reversed Stangrecki’s policy and gone back to obeying the ordinance that prevents this. Nonetheless, the clear lesson here is that Pittsburgh cops spend a lot of time on administrative tasks that might otherwise be spent on active repression. We can think of ways to make them waste even more time, but we will save these for another post.

Lost in the fuss was the fact that the city had been here before, and not long ago either. As recently as last summer, the media was fulminating about crime and lawlessness – but in Southside in the East Carson Street bar district. Gainey reacted predictably. He called a community meeting to address concerns and announce his plan, which, you guessed it, was to increase the number of cops assigned to the area and remind everyone that the Southside police substation was almost finished being constructed. The move was effective, politically at least. The media over the next few months transitioned to amplifying complaints about panhandling and occasional shootings in the downtown triangle instead of Southside. Actual shootings continued to occur on and around East Carson Street, but they were now being treated as isolated events rather than an existential threat.

It’s not surprising then, that the mayor went back to the same playbook this time around. Early returns seem encouraging for him. Even conservative District Attorney Stephen Zappala, who has no love for Gainey, was fairly muted in his criticism. Fraternal Order of Police local president Bob Swartzwelder was a bit more vehement, but the substance of his complaint was only that officers assigned to downtown would not be available elsewhere, which is simply obvious. A critical op-ed in the Post-Gazette demanded that Gainey demonstrate “effective leadership” and reassure the cops that they are “valued and respected”, but this appears to be an outlier. Liberal groups such as Black Political Empowerment Project and Alliance for Police Accountability have not weighed in, further contributing to what is becoming an extended honeymoon for Gainey with his base.

This leaves a glaring question: What is the mayor’s strategy actually going to accomplish besides maybe getting KDKA off his back for a while? For starters, substations cost money, money that would be better spent on affordable housing. Gainey claimed at the town hall that 45 new single room occupancy units were on the way, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the need. More broadly, we need to recognize that in both Southside and downtown, Gainey is pandering to the demands of white yuppies, business owners, and corporations. Shootings are just the excuse. Black teenagers are shot nearly every week in Pittsburgh, in neighborhoods across the city, but new police substations only appear in areas that the ruling class considers important. Quotes from recent media coverage reveal a lot of concern for issues like parking and aggressive panhandling, but little for human life. Most respondents only mention shootings that affected them personally, such as when a stray bullet broke one of their windows. The following quote from an article in Trib Live about crime in Southside is pretty typical: ‘“We are a college bar,” he said. “If we don’t stay open late, we don’t stay profitable and we go under.”’ This bias is an effect of the media’s habit of ignoring the views of those actually being shot at, but it does provide an accurate reflection of elite attitudes.

There is a silver lining here. Per Swartzwelder’s point, police assigned to harass Black students as they change trains downtown after school won’t be available to harass the same students when they get home. Officers concentrated on East Carson Street can’t simultaneously patrol other Zone 3 neighborhoods like Carrick and Beltzhoover. The side effect of beefing up police presence at sites of capitalist production is a corresponding neglect of the outlying neighborhoods where most poor people live.

This shouldn’t stop us from recognizing how Gainey’s approach to policing downtown fits into his broader strategy. As the liberal Black politician who knocked off the hated Bill Peduto, Gainey is highly insulated from criticism from other Black liberals. They don’t want to take any chance of opening the door to a white challenger in 2025. White liberals, inculcated as they are with the theory of white allyship, are following the lead of their Black counterparts. This leaves Gainey free to mollify conservative business interests with measures like evicting homeless camps and building substations. As long as he doesn’t piss off either side too badly, he can continue in office as the compromise candidate that no one hates quite enough to make a serious attempt to dislodge. Radicals should not be taken in.

CSRG began to come together a few months before the first Public Source piece appeared, with the purpose of retooling the county’s approach to dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises. Its last known membership breaks down like this: eleven civilian employees of city and county government, most of them in the county Department of Human Services; six current or former police officers; six representatives of UPMC, Pitt, or Allegheny Health Network; seven executives from tame local charities; three representatives of large foundations; an academic; and Braddock Mayor Chardae Jones, the lone member who, at least in theory, has to answer directly to voters.

Personnel is policy. Even at its formation, one could get a rough idea of what CRSG was up to just from who it excluded. Nowhere to be found were any independent front-line organizations who deal with mental health crises regularly, like Prevention Point or Bridge to the Mountains. Similarly left out were liberal reformist groups that nonetheless have some critique of the police, such as ACLU of Pennsylvania or Alliance for Police Accountability. Everyone involved was obviously firmly in the corner of law enforcement, if not from personal inclination, then as a condition of their continued employment. It wasn’t quite clear what CRSG was going to actually do, but who they were going to do it for was not in question. Probability seemed high that it would at least do something. Typically, such blue ribbon commissions are launched with great fanfare, spend months or years “investigating” some perceived emergency, and finally, after the scandal that birthed them has slipped out of the news cycle, release a voluminous report that is promptly filed away and ignored forever after. Here was a blue ribbon commission so averse to grandstanding that it wouldn’t even talk to the press. Its recommendations clocked in at a trim and tidy eight pages, as far from the usual unreadable doorstop as can be imagined. CRSG was obviously serious about achieving its goal, whatever that goal was. We don’t have to look very far to see why.

In July of 2020, when CRSG was conceived, police everywhere were dealing with the George Floyd uprising. Actual riots had subsided in most cities, but protests were still a daily occurrence. The demand to abolish the police was being diverted into merely defunding them, but at the time it seemed like that fallback position might be gaining traction. Activists across the country were advocating for money to be taken from police budgets and put toward more humane responses to mental health emergencies. Many pundits were holding up the example of Eugene, Oregon, where the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program has been sending medics and social workers, unencumbered by cops, to answer 911 calls for minor incidents since 1989. Denver’s STAR initiative, which is based on the CAHOOTS model, was ramping up as well. To the cops, the threat was obvious. CAHOOTS answers 17 percent of Eugene’s 911 calls, with a budget only one percent the size of EPD’s. Granted, police do other things besides chase 911 calls, but it’s still easy to imagine many police chiefs responding to those numbers with a heartfelt “Fuck that, nobody’s cutting my budget by 17 percent!”

With this in mind, lets take a look at those eight pages. Taken as a whole, they are hopelessly inadequate, but individually none of them can be faulted. The county cleverly exploited this feature to design a survey meant to drum up support for CRSG’s work. The survey carefully omitted any question of overall effectiveness, asking respondents only to rate the recommendations on an individual basis. It got the result it was meant to, with every recommendation receiving well over 90 percent approval. Let’s not be taken in. As with the group’s membership list, what is left out of the recommendations is at least as revealing as what is included. For starters, CRSG says nothing about CAHOOTS, STAR, or any similar program. The closest they come is recommending beefing up resolve Crisis Services, and possibly having resolve employees ride with cops on patrol. This is different from CAHOOTS, however. CAHOOTS workers are often dispatched by 911 operators to qualifying calls without police involvement, whereas resolve relies solely on its own phone number and is most often contacted for support by the police themselves. There is one cryptic suggestion in the recommendations that reads “Could also consider Emergency Medical Services + Mental Health co-response model.“, but this isn’t what CAHOOTS does either – rather, it’s completely separate from Eugene’s EMS and police departments, and has its own vehicles.

We can see now why CRSG’s membership had to be so tightly controlled, and why the group has stayed so resolutely below radar. It doesn’t take a hard core abolitionist to think that a program that both saves money and improves outcomes in other cities might be worth adopting here. Those recommendations couldn’t be allowed near anyone who might have ever heard of CAHOOTS, unless that person was guaranteed to be so firmly in the bag that they didn’t mind wasting millions of taxpayer dollars as long as the money went to the police.

That can’t be the whole story, though. The agencies represented on CRSG have more than enough political clout to fend off a CAHOOTS-like program in Pittsburgh without going to this much trouble. Many of their recommendations are substantive, even sensible. Most have nothing to do with 911 response. The rest of the document is much more than window dressing for an anti-CAHOOTS campaign. Recommendations one, eight, and fourteen for example, stress the need for low barrier walk-in centers and clinics that are open around the clock. These ideas obviously informed the creation of Second Avenue Commons, the newly-built homeless shelter next to Allegheny County Jail. We wrote about Second Ave. Commons, aka Jailview Apartments, in a previous post. The new shelter is a combo platter of bandaid, PR stunt, and surveillance hub that can’t possibly solve the problem it purports to address and was never meant to anyway. Financially and logistically however, it still constitutes a major project. Here we again see the difference between CRSG’s recommendations and a typical blue ribbon commission report. Usually, if any of the recommended measures are implemented at all, it’s only the cheapest and least controversial ones. Here the most expensive and difficult thing was done early.

The remainder of CRSG’s recommended steps are a grab bag of worthy but minor reforms. It’s tempting to dismiss some of them as mere fluff, included only for PR purposes and not intended to be taken seriously. Does CRSG really care about, say, number sixteen (“Increase the number of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) behavioral health providers.“)? Or is it only thrown in to make it look like the group is concerned about racism? Here we have to remember that the recommendations weren’t originally intended for public consumption. PR fluff doesn’t work if nobody ever sees it, and no one would ever have even heard about GRSG or its recommendations if it weren’t for Rich Lord. On some level all the recommendations are meant to be taken seriously. The question we have to answer is how they advance their authors’ agenda.

Once again, it’s useful to analyze what was omitted. In that spirit, number fifteen is worth quoting in its entirety.

Develop a process to address mistrust and hurt between communities and government, including law enforcement. The City of Pittsburgh started this work in 2015 through a collaboration with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust & Justice. Pittsburgh was selected as one of six pilot sites to employ strategies, examine policies, and develop evidence through research to reduce implicit bias, enhance procedural justice, and promote racial reconciliation. Ideas include:

> Leverage the work that has previously been done with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust & Justice.

> Build on this effort to acknowledge and address the history of racial trauma in all of Allegheny County, and the mistrust and hurt that has built up over time between government (including law enforcement) and communities of color, with a particular focus on Black communities.

CRSG’s law enforcement focus shines through clear as day here. If the idea was to move as much responsibility as possible away from the police via programs like CAHOOTS, “mistrust between communities and government” wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal. The group could take it as a given that everybody hates the cops, and do everything in its power to minimize police involvement in dealing with mental health issues. It’s also instructive that the only action items CRSG could come up with amounted to “keep doing that one thing we started seven years ago.” and “yeah, we’re racist, but we should at least admit it.” If the Pittsburgh police were really interested in building trust with Black communities they could try reinstituting the city residency requirement for officers. And if CRSG wants to hire more Black social workers, why not also hire more Black cops? Neither of these measures would do much of course, but they couldn’t be any less effective than “develop(ing) evidence through research to reduce implicit bias”, and attempting them would at least show that police were willing to make sacrifices to mend fences with Black residents. Just like the submarining of CAHOOTS, recommendation fifteen makes it obvious that a key objective of CRSG is to maintain the status quo for the police.

Similar limitations are shot through the entire document. Take number twelve for example, “Address basic housing needs.“, which heads a laundry list of bandaids and half measures related to housing security. Nowhere on the list is any attempt to build more affordable housing. Nowhere on the list is any suggestion to create new laws favorable to tenants. Rent control? You’re kidding, right? Instead, we get gems like “Provide guidance to local housing authorities and landlords to reduce collateral consequences of criminal records, and other barriers to housing for people with behavioral health needs and justice system contact” and (our fave!) “Convene a network of landlords that are committed to supporting people with behavioral health needs.” In fact, no political solutions appear anywhere in the document. It doesn’t once suggest passing, repealing, or amending any law, despite the obvious problems that oppressive laws pose to CRSG’s purported clients. It might be objected that since the group has so few elected officials among its members, it would be overreaching its authority by promoting legislative remedies, but such arguments ignore the realities of local politics. The organizations represented on CRSG have all the influence they need to get legislation passed at the municipal and county levels, especially if they allied themselves with some of the activist groups who were so carefully excluded from membership.

Speaking of laws, another benefit almost completely absent from the recommendations is support for those caught in the criminal justice system, perhaps a consequence of the county public defenders office being among the agencies frozen out of CRSG membership. Given the immense damage to mental health caused by arrests and confinement, this is a significant omission. Anyone whose mental stability was on shaky ground when they went into Allegheny County Jail is likely to be a lot worse off by the time they get out. Yet the only gesture toward alleviating this situation is the anemic “Reduce or eliminate fines and fees to ensure people have adequate financial resources to access housing“, listed in both number four and number twelve. It’s not clear how this would be accomplished, but maybe someone could convene a network of prosecutors who are committed to supporting people with behavioral health needs. They could meet in the same phone booth as the landlords.

If there’s one lesson to take away from CRSG’s approach to addressing mental health emergencies, it’s simply this: We can’t have nice things. If we leave it up to the “stakeholders”, we’ll never get rent control, CAHOOTS, eviction protections, or any other humane and effective approach to ameliorating the city’s twin crises of housing precarity and mental health. Instead, we’ll see the same lip service and minor tinkering as before, except more tightly coordinated by CRSG’s members, and paired with aggressive camp sweeps and broken windows policing. To understand the group’s philosophy, we need look no further than the introduction to the recommendations, which defines ‘crisis’ as: “…an instance when emergency services are engaged because a person is in acute mental health distress, engaged in problematic substance use, is experiencing unsheltered homelessness or has an intellectual disability/autism.” In other words, substance abuse, mental health distress, homelessness, and autism are fine as long as they happen out of sight where emergency “services” never has to deal with them. CRSG’s collective interest lies in managing problems, not in solving them. The organization’s strategy is to get out ahead of any demands for substantive change by pushing ahead with limited small reforms, while freezing dissenting voices out of the conversation.

By now it should be abundantly clear that we can’t count on CRSG, or by extension any of the agencies and organizations it includes, to deliver any effective solutions to mental health needs in Allegheny County. If we want that to happen, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. The sooner we start, the faster it will happen…

• The things malfunction often. “You get hundreds of false alerts,” according to a probation officer quoted in the piece. That of course makes it much harder to know when someone has disabled one.
• Those ankle bracelets can sometimes be removed and put back on without cutting them. YMMV depending on make, model, and foot size, but still…
• Even if you get caught, you can just blame it on faulty equipment.

Ankle bracelet wearers should be sure to read the whole article for full technical details.

Less celebrated in the media were the drawbacks. No one under 18 would be admitted, and there were only 95 shelter beds, plus another 45 single room occupancy rooms for longer term stays, nowhere near enough to accommodate Allegheny County’s growing homeless population. Residents would be charged $525 a month for the SRO rooms. Worse, Pittsburgh’s practice of opening warming shelters in the winter would cease once the new facility came on line. Regardless, Second Avenue Commons, the new shelter’s official name, was greeted by many leftists and nonprofits as a positive development. In some ways they’re right, but looking at it from a viewpoint of counterinsurgency and social control reveals a darker aspect.

Let’s start by setting the stage. Pittsburgh is a liberal city, a blue bastion where politicians of all stripes are more or less forced to be Democrats because it’s the only game in town. Since construction began on Second Ave. Commons, then-mayor Bill Peduto has been replaced by Ed Gainey, a Black liberal politician beloved by the city’s progressives, but who maintains a close working relationship with businesses and development interests. And as chronicled in our last post, former police chief Scott Schubert has been replaced on an interim basis by Thomas Stangrecki, who is presumably interested in holding the position permanently. Finally, we should not neglect Pittsburgh’s nonprofit corporations and foundations, who are major players in local politics.

One of the city’s largest nonprofits is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a hospital chain with its own health insurance provider. UPMC’s Mercy Behavioral Health arm will be running the new shelter and its associated medical services. Several other foundations contributed startup funds, and the land was donated by the city via the Urban Redevelopment Authority. This might seem like an odd decision at first glance. Why give away valuable property in Pittsburgh’s cramped downtown to a homeless shelter that could as easily have been shuffled off to Northside? It makes a lot more sense given Second Ave. Commons’ location – right next door to Allegheny County Jail, leading observers to unofficially rechristen the place Jailview Apartments. The area doesn’t get enough foot traffic to drive retail sales, office space is a drug on the market since so many local yuppies have been working from home, and nobody is going to drop a quarter million dollars on a condo beside a jail with a view of an overpass. Since there’s nothing else to do with the parcel, the city government gets to unload a white elephant from its portfolio and get a nice PR boost in the process.

The remote, yet central location is also convenient for the police, for a number of reasons. Jailview’s one stop shopping for services is a great way to keep the state’s homelessness surveillance database current. It also means that many homeless people who don’t live there will still be spending a lot of time in the place, making it easy for them to be picked up on outstanding warrants, especially if workers there tip off police about upcoming appointments. And since the shelter is supposedly taking a more tolerant approach to drug use, many residents and visitors won’t bother getting rid of illegal substances before checking in. The cops will have many opportunities to rack up cheap possession busts by posting up near Jailview and stopping and frisking anyone who looks like a client. But best of all, from a police point of view, is the opportunity to get homeless people out of sight where they won’t spark complaints. In other words, one of the reasons the homeless shelter is next to the jail is the same reason the jail was placed there in the first place – it’s tucked away in an isolated pocket of downtown where few yuppies will have to be reminded that it exists.

Jailview Apartments plays another role in invisiblising the homeless by giving the police an excuse to sweep camps. Unlike many cities, Pittsburgh doesn’t have a Skid Row. There is no single massive camp in the middle of the city, just small groups of tents strung along the riverbanks. Yet this relative unobtrusiveness has not stopped yuppies from complaining about having to see poor people while jogging on riverside bike paths. Local media amplifies yuppie whining while excluding any opposing narratives. The police, ever responsive to their true clientele, would like nothing better than to clear out every tent between 40th Street and the West End bridge, but there are complications. Mayor Gainey, less than a year into his term, is still in his honeymoon phase with the liberals that put him in office. He doesn’t want to risk the optics of his police force destroying the only shelter many homeless people have just as the weather has turned cold. Stangrecki can’t afford to piss off Gainey if he wants to preserve any chance of becoming permanent chief. The compromise they all arrived at was to wait until Jailview opened before doing widespread sweeps, regardless of the reality that it won’t have enough room for most of those evicted.

Fast forward to today, two months after the latest possible original completion date, and Jailview still hasn’t opened, even as temperatures have plunged below freezing. Promised move-in dates slipped to October, then to November 15, the traditional date when the city opens warming shelters at night. The latest promise from the city is November 21, the Monday before Thanksgiving, but this too seems likely to slip. Electricians were observed working in the lobby on Thursday, November 17, leaving only two working days to finish construction and get a final inspection from the Department of Permits, Licensing, and Inspection. If PLI doesn’t turn up before Thanksgiving week, we can expect further delays until personnel return from vacation.

Not surprisingly, the cops have been getting antsy. Despite the new shelter still not being open, they gave a seven day notice of eviction to a small camp located beneath the convention center beside the Allegheny Riverfront Park trail. (Keep in mind that the only reason they even bothered giving notice is that they were forced to by a lawsuit brought by the ACLU). Pittsburgh Union of Regional Renters describes the ensuing bureaucratic mess:

“A week and a half ago, multiple local news reports declared homeless neighbors would be swept off the side of the Allegheny River Trail, if not also away from other encampments in town. Here’s one. Here’s another one.”

“For days, the Ed Gainey administration chose to do nothing to correct this notion. It left us, and the homeless people we know to believe it was the truth. Many of us believe it was the truth — not least of all because even officials far closer to the mayor than any of us also could not get real answers, even as official notices of a sweep stood posted above the tents of homeless Pittsburghers. As a result, homeless people who still needed support and shelter scattered, fearing reports of a sweep. If this wasn’t intentional, it was extremely, predictably harmful. Or as one homeless comrade put it, ‘Yeah, they scared the fuck out of a lotta people.’“

“Because we had been to the camps, when members of the administration breathlessly insisted late in the day on Wednesday that everyone had been helped, we knew they were lying. We knew they would have no way of knowing if the things they were saying were true. We know they are not because we continue to work with former trailside residents who remain homeless. It was only as public backlash Tuesday and phone calls Wednesday rang into the mayor’s office did the administration even begin to give tangible answers to public officials and advocates. Only then did the public plan for Thursday begin to take shape, or – as we believe – change to something less inhumane.“

“A government – and let’s be clear, the county bears responsibility this too – should be responsive to our reactions. It also should not treat the people its already failed as carelessly and violently as it has for decades upon decades. Last week was no exception. The hotel stays for those that got them have since ended while the Second Ave. shelter (AKA Jailview) is still not open. This supposedly “low-barrier” shelter will not be accepting children, either. And the city plans to close its cold-weather shelter once the Second Ave. shelter opens — knowing full well there are hundreds more homeless than there are shelter beds in the city.“

“We continue to refer the homeless people we meet and eat with to the best city resources available through the best channels we’ve got. Many of us who were (re)activated by recent events are committing to bolster the ongoing autonomous and material support of our homeless neighbors. Part and parcel with that work is telling the truth of what we saw and keep seeing. None of us are particularly trustful of public officials in the first place. Last week’s attempt at “PC” homeless sweeps only deepens that distrust, and our resolve.“

All residents ended up leaving before the threatened sweep, but even the few who scored temporary hotel rooms from the city report being kicked out of them days sooner than promised, with the new shelter still not open. It’s hard not to see the rooms as a bribe for dispersing quietly, rather than a good faith attempt to provide temporary housing. Similarly, Jailview’s purpose is more to satisfy the political needs of a few powerful people and organizations, than to be a serious solution to Pittsburgh’s housing shortage. If the city and county governments really wanted to end homelessness locally, they could seize mostly empty office buildings by eminent domain and convert them to affordable housing. They could fund the Pittsburgh Land Bank. They could institute rent control. They could pass a law requiring hotels to make their vacant rooms available for temporary housing. Bare minimum, they could let people camp on city property without being harassed and evicted. Instead they opt to brush homelessness, and those who suffer from it, under the rug, while holding up a false solution to better pretend to be doing something useful.

Addendum: We have learned that residents began moving into the SRO rooms late on Thursday, November 17, but that the shelter beds and drop-in center will not be available until at least the 21st.

Addendum 2: The new occupancy permit for Jailview can be found on line. Currently it lists the SRO rooms, warming center, and lounge/storage – but not the shelter beds.

Addendum 3: Jailview opened the shelter portion of the facility at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, November 22. In unexpected good news, the city announced that the cold weather overflow shelter at 620 Smithfield St. would remain open, contradicting previous plans to shut it down when Jailview became available.

Schubert essentially inherited the top spot in early 2017, after his predecessor Cameron McLay resigned following several years of conflict with the Fraternal Order of Police and Hissrich. McLay’s fate was probably sealed after he posed with activists from Whats Up? Pittsburgh while holding a sign reading “I Resolve to Challenge Racism @ Work.” FOP members, incensed at being called racist (lol), issued a vote of no confidence in McLay the following year, and he was gone a few months later.

That left Schubert as the safe, uncontroversial choice to be McLay’s successor. He had spent a quarter century in the PBP, going along to get along under corrupt dinosaurs like McLay’s predecessor Nate Harper, but with a masters degree in criminal justice administration, he could speak the language of inclusivity and antiracism. His mission was to project an image of a modern, data driven, community oriented police department, while, behind the scenes, maintaining the old reality of an oppressive force occupying Black neighborhoods. Challenging racism at work was right out. The goal was rather to defend it.

He might have pulled off this balancing act if not for the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riot. The protests two years earlier over Antwon Rose II’s slaying at the hands of a suburban cop stretched the department’s resources and cost the city a small fortune in overtime, but were never large or intense enough to overwhelm police logistics (or PR efforts). This time was different. Pittsburgh’s downtown was smashed to shit on the afternoon of May 30, 2020, and after that the cops were way more interested in payback than public relations, Schubert included. Throughout the summer, the city saw protesters maimed by police projectiles, kidnapped by plainclothes cops in unmarked vans, and subjected to previously unimaginable amounts of tear gas. The chief’s efforts at spin control were inconsistent, to say the least. Following a protest in East Liberty a couple of days after the riot, his department swore up and down that no tear gas had been used, in spite of numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary, only to reverse themselves the next day and admit that they had deployed gas after all. All this in spite of Schubert having been at the protest in person. Later in the summer the chief attempted to defend the black-bagging of a protester on misdemeanor charges as a “low visibility arrest” – as if disappearing someone off a sidewalk in broad daylight was perfectly OK as long as no one noticed.

Schubert’s missteps during the protests in 2020 made him easy prey for the progressives on Gainey’s transition team, just as McLay’s botched attempt to connect with the activist community left him vulnerable to attack by conservatives and the FOP. One chief can be said to have crashed on the rock, the other on the hard place. Yet the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police itself sailed on unscathed through the turmoil, enjoying regular budget and personnel increases, even in the face of a nation-wide campaign to defund police. (Fun fact: Their bicycle unit recently received brand new e-bikes.) It’s hard to see what either side gained from either firing besides a notch on their belt. Was the FOP really any better off during Schubert’s tenure than McLay’s? It was McLay after all, who pushed to eliminate the hated residency requirement for police, finally allowing them to live outside the city.

More importantly, will Pittsburgh’s poor Black neighborhoods see any relief from a post-Schubert PBP? The open chief’s position is now the subject of the proverbial nationwide search for the perfect candidate. Those searches have a history of concluding that the perfect candidate just happens to be the guy already holding down the job on a (supposedly) temporary basis, but this one might be different. As a new broom sweeping clean, Gainey might well conclude that swapping out one time-serving careerist for another (Deputy Chief Thomas Stangrecki in this case) isn’t quite the look he’s going for. Regardless of who is running the PBP however, cops are cops, especially in this town. A recent audit showed that 85 percent of marijuana arrests by the PBP were of Black people – even though only 22 percent of the the city’s population is Black. The audit is only the latest in a string (1, 2) of studies showing racist arrest patterns by the department.

The FOP and PBP leaders can thus be seen as pulling a good cop, bad cop routine. Which one is which depends on one’s point of view. Community members are told by whoever is occupying the chief’s hot seat that he would love to make his officers turn on their body cameras, if that darned union contract wasn’t tying his hands – but if he had a bigger budget he could at least do more implicit bias training. Meanwhile the FOP is, for example, telling racist yuppies “We’d love to round up all the homeless people along the river and stick them in Allegheny County Jail, but those woke socialists in management won’t let us. And by the way, we could use more money for tear gas, we almost ran out during the riot.”

They’re both lying, of course. The chief knows that if body cameras were always on his department would become enmeshed in regular scandals, while sweeping crackdowns on the surplus population, as satisfying as they might be to the city’s more reactionary elements, would require far more work than any cop wants to put in. By pointing fingers at each other, both the police union and city officials can mollify their respective bases of support and continue using the PBP to maintain racial capitalism in its current form. The process does sometimes require a sacrifice at the top, but this is a very small price to pay to keep business humming along as usual. Activists should recognize how little difference it makes who occupies the top spot in the PBP, and focus their efforts more on systemic change than symbolic personnel changes.